The Making of a Grey Panther: The Derrick Humphreys Story

Sidney Allinson is a Victoria-based communications consultant, Canadian
news correspondent for Britain’s The Army Quarterly and Defence, and
author of The Bantams: The Untold Story of World War I.

This very personal memoir of a resourceful immigrant who became
successful in a variety of endeavors—engineer, soldier, and
politician—combines an inspirational message with a good deal of
nuts-and-bolts detail that could be instructive for would-be
politicians. As one might expect from an “as told to” account, the
prose is occasionally unpolished, but not oppressively so.

Humphreys’s orderly upbringing in England gave way to homesickness
when, as a youngster, he was sent out to Australia to seek his fortune.
After obtaining engineering qualifications and mining work, he married,
saw war service in New Guinea, and then took a variety of jobs before
settling down in British Columbia. He entered politics, serving as mayor
of West Vancouver for eight years. (His anecdotes about municipal
politics would curl the hair of the average voter.) Humphreys’s
mayoral career ended on a sad note, unlike this autobiography, which
closes with an upbeat call for grey power to alleviate Canada’s woes.